Noah increased Twitpic’s virality: through ease of logging in (you just use your Twitter account), making sure everything stays connected (photo comments go back to Twitter), and adding new features and updating the design

Setbacks, Mistakes And Feelings Of Quitting

Twitpic grew too big for Noah; he started becoming overwhelmed

it was only him at Twitpic; he was support, scaling, servers, new features, and he couldn’t handle it

he didn’t know anything about scaling, so Twitpic was constantly overloaded and crashing

he was now receiving negative backlash from users and bad publicity on blogs

even one of the founders of Twitter publicly asked for an alternative to Twitpic

competitors started to arrive and were verbally attacking Twitpic

some days he wanted to just give up and shut the site down, his feelings were hurt at all the negative backlash

it was an emotional rollercoaster each day

How He Persevered

the day he was going to shut the site down he went for an hour drive and decided to give it one more go, as much as he could

he locked himself in his apartment for 2-3 weeks; no cell phone, no TV, no Twitter

got a new hardware provider and rebuilt the site from the ground up to run on a scalable platform; it worked

he got thicker skin

focused more on the user’s experience

and started hiring

Company Overview (First Hires)

Noah is based in Charleston, South Carolina

his first hires were his parents, based in Oklahoma; he initially had to educate them on internet basics

his dad takes care of the business side: taxes, accounting, revenue

his mom does the secretary work: handling his schedule

he hired a developer, Steve Carona, who is based in New York; they’ve never met but Steve meshes perfectly

This guy impresses me. Self taught programmer, built a 7 figure business, passed on the opportunity to cash out because it was too fun, that’s what entrepreneurship is all about. I can definitely relate to him about the emotional roller coaster. Starting and running PremierInterns.com gave me first hand experience on dealing with emotional roller coasters. This guy has been able to generate revenue whereas Twitter relies on VC money…I think TwitPic has a much better business model. Keep up the good work Noah.

Wondering why he didn’t add some features when business grew big. For example the lack of easy accessable statistics still annoys me. But ok, maybe it’s a matter of concentrating on “core functionality” or something. After all twitpic always worked without problems for me.